


Red Oak Day

by Vehemently



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Community: spn_summergen, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-06-25
Updated: 2007-06-25
Packaged: 2017-11-07 23:23:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/436572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vehemently/pseuds/Vehemently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How do they know there's no such thing as unicorns? Here's how.</p><p>Written for kroki_refur, in spn_summergen 2007.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Oak Day

_Sanford, New York  
May 28, 1998_

The school year, and the stringbean jokes, were almost at an end. Sam could have hardly imagined a situation in which he'd be actively eager for Dad to up stakes and move them on, but being the tallest kid in the eighth grade was exactly that situation. He wasn't the only fifteen year old, but that was because half the class was lunkheads who's been held back a year, and he was _still_ the tallest kid, and the one who got tripped on his way out every door. He slung his backpack down on the kitchen table in disgust, and it slid all the way across the table to spew books onto the floor. It was not Sam's day.

The windows were all closed and locked, leaving the apartment stuffy in the early summer heat. At least Dad had left the shades down; Sam went around opening every window as he shed his sweaty clothes and re-entered the kitchen in underwear and a slightly better mood. He hung his limbs off the fridge door, wondering why the leftovers never survived even one day for him to eat as, you know, actual leftovers.

Dean the human vacuum cleaner was why, of course. Sam pulled out jelly and sliced bread and set about making himself a snack.

He was halfway through jelly sandwich #3 when Dad walked in, cheeks red and his gray t-shirt ringed with sweat. Sam straightened instantly, shuffling his library hoard so that there was at least a little space for someone else at the table. Dean sauntered in a few seconds after Dad, looking like he'd been under a garden hose. He slapped a clammy hand down on the back of Sam's neck on his way toward the fridge, singing, "I love this job."

"Dude," mumbled Sam, getting a whiff. "You smell like feet."

Dean chuckled. "And you smell like ladies' perfume, Sammy. What happened to the leftovers?" He kicked the fridge shut and pulled off his t-shirt.

" _You_ ate 'em," Sam accused.

"There's a box fan in the crawlspace," said Dad, as he sat at the table. He took a long look up Sam's narrow frame. "You think you can fit in there?" Of course Sam could fit in there, or anyway better than Dad or Dean. He fetched the fan, banging his head only once on the low doorway, and dragged it back into the kitchen.

Dad had taken the opportunity to shed his t-shirt too, and a whole Winchester laundry pile was starting to grow on the dirty linoleum. Dad sat there at the table, writing notes in his book, while Dean stuck his head under the tap. He pulled his head up, splattering water, just in time to get Sam in the face. Stung, Sam wiped his eyes as he set up the fan. He turned around and let the spinning blades cool his back.

The way Dean leaned on the counter was a pose straight out of CHiPS, or maybe one of those 70s cop movies that were always rerun in the middle of the night. He even had a big ugly medallion, or anyway his amulet, even if it wasn't on a pimp chain. Sam glanced from him to Dad and back: they were men, square-shouldered and tough, stubble on their faces, big guys you wouldn't want to have to fight. Sam crossed his arms across his skinny chest, and then went and put on a fresh t-shirt.

"You want Chinese?" Dean called into the bedroom. He had the menu open on the table on top of Sam's books, and was studying it as if Chinese menus were any different from here to Alaska. "I got some cash left from that Livingstone job."

"Give me those," Sam squawked, and rescued the stack of books. He tried to fit them all at once into his backpack, but they shuffled off each other and were on the floor all over again. Definitely not Sam's day.

"What's with all the leisure reading?" Dean kicked gently at one spine after another. "Oh, dude, check that out. Dad, check this out. Sam's got us covered already." He stood up with one of Sam's medieval history books in his hand. Sam lunged for it, really not in the mood to be mocked. As Dean lifted the book above his head Sam raised his arm to chase and they both realized at the same instant that the trick wasn't going to work any more. They were almost exactly the same height, eyeball to eyeball, and Sam's arms were already longer. Dean blinked at him, a little stunned and maybe a little charmed, and let Sam have the book.

"Give it here," Dad rumbled, impassive.

Dean murmured, "When did that happen?" while Sam handed over the book. There was no reason for it to have anything to do with anything, really -- it was just a book about medieval France. But Dad didn't open the book at all: he just stared at its cover.

"Where'd you get this?"

Sam colored. "It's a library book, Dad. Libraries are where you get free books, you know. You don't have to steal them."

Dad gave him The Look.

"I'm writing an ethics paper about France in the Middle Ages. Actually," and really, he had every right to be snotty, they were butting in on his _homework_ , "it's a paper about how all those honorable knights went around cheating on each other's wives all the time."

"Excellent," said Dean.

Dad flipped the book over, eyeballed the description on the back, and then returned to the front. "So tell me about the cover."

It was a picture Sam had seen a hundred times, especially in all his internet research. People loved to put it on postcards and stuff, and although Sam was pretty sure it wasn't actually from France or about France, it probably helped the book sell itself. It was a red background, maybe a painting or a tapestry Sam couldn't remember, with flowers all over. A lady sat in a clearing, and by her side, allowing her hand on its horn, was a unicorn about the size of a mastiff. "It's medieval art. There's this whole thing about maidens and the color white and unicorns and virtue." Sam stopped himself just in time from adding a comment about the irony of gigantic long poky things standing next to maidens, because there was no chance Dean couldn't make a fool out of him about that.

Dean cackled, "Yooneycorns," and handed the Chinese menu to Sam. "Spinster old lady down east of town swears she saw one. Here, go crazy. Order enough for leftovers, this time."

Dad was even-handed with The Look. He let Dean have it, but Dean just busted out laughing. He put a hand over his stomach, as if he might rupture something from laughing so hard. His cheerful peals just somehow always _worked_ , and Dad uncoiled from that frowning tension and put the book down. He was downright gruff when he said, "You keep laughing, kid, right up till it gores you in the belly and I'm carrying you on my back out of the woods. If I drive real fast, maybe we'll make it to Binghamton Hospital before you die."

Sam picked up the phone and dialed for takeout. They were not seriously talking about unicorns in the meadows outside of Sanford, New York. Of all the places in New York, of all the places in the country Sam had seen, Sanford was pretty much last on the list in terms of deserving unicorns, maybe right after downtown Detroit in January. They were not seriously talking about unicorns, period.

Still chuckling, Dean wiped tears out of his eyes. "I'm just saying. Albino deer, a moose dunked in buttermilk, kind of more likely."

"You think anybody outside the village doesn't get off potshots at critters in their back yard all summer long? These people know what a deer looks like, Dean."

Dean drifted into the kitchen to supervise the Chinese order, or really, to point over Sam's shoulder in the most annoying possible way. "Yooneycorn," he scoffed into Sam's ear, and got himself laughing again.

***

Dean was not laughing when Dad assigned him to unicorn research that next afternoon. Since Dad needed the car to go talk to potential witnesses, Dean had to walk to the library like any ordinary fool, grumbling all the way about how the whole point of finishing high school was supposed to be that you no longer spent your afternoons in the library. Sam kicked him in the ankle for that one, and was chased right up to the front doors. "Safe!" he called, as he tagged them.

Dean stuffed his fingers into his pockets. "Quit it, Sammy. That's kid stuff." He pulled open the door and pushed Sam through roughly, though he'd been kid enough to tease just a minute before.

Shoulders hunched, Sam stepped into the cool of the old library. It was one of the few things he would miss about this town, when they moved on: a Carnegie library, tall and airy and inefficient, in that way of old buildings. There were stone pillars out front and high ceilings inside, and every single ceiling had a rust-colored crack in it. The whole place smelled like an attic, and the stacks were draped with elderly cobwebs. Sam had considered trying to live there, like that girl in a novel who hid out in a museum; but it was too small and he would eventually get caught. Mrs. Rotherton, the librarian, liked him well enough, but he doubted it was well enough to let him bunk down in the 910s (Biography).

The carrels by the window were shady and quiet, and Sam settled into one with an encyclopedia of folklore. Dean, on the other hand, flitted from one section to another, so much so that Mrs. Rotherton came up to him, shoulders squared. Sam watched that dazzling Dean Winchester smile come out, and any thought she might have had about him being a drug dealer or a weirdo disappeared in an instant. She was corraling him back to the reference desk and sitting him down in front of a computer before he could say Jack Robinson. He paid her rapt attention, watching her mouth form every word. She was smiling back at him, probably without even realizing it.

Mrs Rotherton was probably _forty_. Sam couldn't fathom it.

He buried his head in the encyclopedia rather than think about that. The two front feet of his chair were just settling to earth when Dean tiptoed up to him and stage-whispered, "Dude, not a unicorn."

"What? No, yeah, I was just coming to find you." Sam held up the volume and pointed at the end of the unicorn entry: SEE ALSO: WHITE HART, SAINT EUSTACE.

"Oh," Dean mumbled, deflating. "I was gonna say it was a white buffalo."

"Like, Doctor Quinn Medicine Woman white buffalo? Seriously?"

"No, you _girl_. Like Ted Nugent white buffalo. And shush, will you? This is a library."

There was no point at all in explaining to Dean that he spent five or ten hours here a week. Sam held his place with a finger and followed Dean back to the computers for a look. Indeed, Ted had written as song about a great white buffalo, and there were artistic amateur drawings to go with it. "Um, buffaloes don't exactly have big horns," Sam pointed out. "I think we're looking for a billy goat."

They had to snigger a little bit. _Had_ to. And then they patted down their pockets for change, to work the photocopier. It was a pretty good haul of paper by the time they were through (where Dean stored all those quarters he wouldn't say, but there were a lot of them), and a couple of books to boot. They trundled it all home through the late-afternoon sunlight, and let themselves back into the stuffy dim apartment. Dad had closed and locked all the windows again, and pulled all the shades.

Sam let life into the place while Dean started arranging their pages on the wall. They had it all in pretty good order by the time Dad got back, sweaty again and with raw marks of brambles on his forearms. He sat at the table and looked directly at Sam and said, "Okay, tell me what you got."

It felt pretty good, walking everybody else through the possibles. Dean just took a chair and listened, though he could as easily have been the one lecturing. Sam found himself organizing and editing the research in his head, like writing a paper without actually writing it, and felt the awesomeness of knowledge buoy him up. At this point, the ethics paper was going to be a total breeze.

"So," he concluded, "take your pick. We have Christianized paganism with the white hart, we have medieval romantic chivalry with the unicorn, and the white buffalo is kind of like a Native American apocalypse scenario."

"Sacrifice, kissing, or lakes of fire, I know which one I want," Dean opined.

"Or it could be the creature that led the Magyar over the river into their new homeland in Scythia, but, I looked in the almanac and this whole county is Anglo."

Dad was tracing the cuts on his forearms, great blunt fingers pushing aside the dark hairs and poking at the raw flesh. Some of the marks had bled, and were scabbed over; others were just white layers of dead skin, torn in weird patterns. Sam couldn't think of what local plant could do that, unless Dad had stumbled into a patch of raspberry canes. Raspberries weren't even ripe, yet.

"You know that Preston kid out on River Road? The youngest, Jimmy?" Dad didn't even acknowledge Sam's presentation; he was talking to Dean. "You think he's got a head on his shoulders?"

"Guess so," Dean shrugged. "Kind of a mama's boy. What'd he say?"

He non-answered, "I guess we got a Great Hunt on our hands." Sam crossed his arms and re-crossed them, not even sure they remembered he was in the room. He couldn't just walk out or Dad would have his hide; but he obviously wasn't part of the conversation.

" _Awesome_ hunt, is more like it. So, you thinking rifles and a blind, or...?"

"Lure it with a virgin," said Dad, blunt as if that were not embarrassing. He worried at the marks on his forearm again, frowning.

But all Dean did was chuckle. "I guess we go back and talk to that spinster old lady. I'm pretty sure none of the women I could pick up would qualify."

They were _not_ seriously talking about this topic.

Dad sat there in silence, thinking, long enough for Dean to grunt and go searching in the fridge. The leftovers, as usual, would not last the day. While Dean yanked at the silverware drawer, Dad said, "Sammy, fetch me that picture here. The third one on the right."

It was a unicorn picture. Sam had printed it out from the internet, along with the six other images that made the set. They were tapestries, scenes made of knotted thread, and the site had said they were huge: twelve or fifteen feet on a side. (That was a lot of knots.) They were only a hundred or so miles away, in New York City, in a museum called the Cloisters. Sam was pretty sure he would never get the chance to go see them in person.

The one Dad asked for was a fragment, most of the original shredded hundreds of years ago. It looked huge and clean and uncluttered on a single page, unlike the others that were busy scenes of battle and crowds and detailed plants. All that had survived the centuries was a vertical rectangle of fabric, showing the unicorn's head and neck. A bare arm curled around that neck, a pale human arm, fingers carding the unicorn's mane. No body or face to say whose arm it was.

"Dean, you working Saturday?" Dad asked, without looking up.

"I can cancel." Dean didn't hesitate or complain.

"You and me on recon Saturday, and then we'll hunt Sunday. Thing shows up midday, so we should be home in time for Sam to be able to handle school on Monday."

"Wait," Sam asked, breathless, "I'm going too?"

Dad looked up at him where he stood against the wall. His gaze was pitiless, critical, thorough. "You're the bait."

"I'm the _WHAT?!_ " Sam exploded, even as, on the other side of Dad, Dean dropped his fork and asked,

"You're making him _bait_?"

The silverware clattered on the countertop and Dad waited till that noise was over before saying anything. "If you've ever been with a girl, you better tell me now."

Sam's mouth dropped open. He actually felt a little dizzy, his heart was beating so fast. Over by the fridge, Dean was grinning like a fool, because he liked to watch Sam humiliated or he found virginity funny or maybe he was just looking to get beat up by a very angry younger brother. Sam flopped down on the couch and crossed his arms again. "Dad," he mumbled miserably. "I'm _fifteen_."

Dad was implacable: "I haul your ass five miles into the woods and find out you're lying, you'll be sorry."

The grin on Dean's face was turning into a chuckle. Sam shouted, "God! Can we stop talking about this?"

"What young Sammy is trying to say is," Dean volunteered, putting a condescending hand on his father's shoulder, "his innocence in matters like these is a great burden to him. And I know just the girl who can help him lift that burden --" Dad twisted up to glare at Dean, "--right _after_ we get done with this hunt."

"I can't believe this. What the hell is wrong with you?" Sam was up and pacing in his agitation, and the only reason he hadn't slammed himself into his bedroom was that the room wasn't his alone, and the door's hinges might not bear a slam. "Why do you even want to hunt this thing? Is it even bothering anybody? What the hell is wrong with you?"

"Language," said Dad, without even looking.

"God!" Sam stomped across the room and let himself out of the apartment. As he pulled the door all the way open to slam it properly, he heard Dean call,

"Sammy, dude, it's called the Great Hunt for a reason."

Sam was half a mile away, and hungry, and considering never going back, before he realized that he'd spent all his pocket change on the photocopier at the library.

***

Sam had all of Saturday to stew and to write his ethics paper, alone in the apartment while Dad and Dean were out doing their manly duty tramping around the woods, stepping on chipmunks and shooting at eagles and laying waste to all of nature. With the box fan in the window and all the windows open, Sam found the heat was almost bearable, and Dean hadn't had the brains to take the leftovers with him. It was, on the whole, a pretty good day.

He even slipped out to the library to type up the paper when he'd finished it. He wanted to show it to Mrs. Rotherton, but of course she wasn't in on Saturdays. Sam printed out the paper twice, and left her a copy.

He walked home through the simmering afternoon, watching the light bend as it came through the heat that hovered above the street. The oaks had unfurled suddenly, on the first of May, like explosions of green after the dull gray winter. The front yards were big in Sanford, thick clovered grass like an unruly carpet and old raggedy hedges and now and then a tree too wide around at the base to reach with your arms. The tar driveways were all cracked with tree roots and age. Creeping vines seemed to eat up the rust on the mailbox posts, tiny fingers twining up, into, around the mailboxes themselves. The sagging gray clapboard houses were far away from each other, screening each other with great sweeps of willow branches like shy girls peeking through their hair.

The dappling shade was calming and cooling as he walked, and Sam wondered where they would go next. He had no control over it, of course. Dad would choose. But there were worse places to be, come summer, than rural New York.

He was thinking about working construction alongside Dean all summer long -- whether they'd hire somebody skinny, whether Dean would freak about being seen with his kid brother -- when he slipped his key in the lock and let himself in. He could instantly tell that someone was home: the air was stifling. Dad was just then closing the last of the windows, and he looked up as he pulled the shade. The sound of the shower running told where Dean was, and it stopped as Sam stood in the doorway.

"Where you been?" Dad asked, not in an accusing way, but it set Sam off all the same.

"Can't I go to the library any more? Scared I might _make it_ with Mrs. Rotherton and ruin all your fun?" He stomped over to his pile of books on the floor, and carefully pressed the folder holding the printed pages of his paper between two of his biggest books. As he straightened he realized he was right under where Dad was standing, and if he'd wanted to Dad could have reached out and swatted him one.

But that wasn't what Dad did. He pulled out a kitchen chair and sat, arm over the back of it, and looked over Sam without saying anything. Sam didn't know what to do or say. He busied himself straightening up the piles of books for Monday.

Dean stuck his head into the kitchen, wet-haired. "Oh, hey, where you been?" Without waiting for an answer, he turned and headed into their bedroom, towel around his waist. Sam measured the breadth of his shoulders as he went, and despaired.

He felt his father's eyes still on him. Stiff, he stood and paced over to the couch, and fumbled around in the cushions for the TV remote. He'd just found it and was pointing it at the TV when Dad said, low,

"You know it doesn't matter. What your brother said yesterday is a crock of shit and I know you know that."

Wary, Sam stood still in the middle of the room and waited for the rest of what Dad had to say. From the bedroom, Dean called, "Hey, I got ears, you know."

Dad leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees. "You can wait till you're seventeen, eighteen, whatever. Don't be doing it just to say you did it, okay? That's not what it's about."

Sam swallowed and sat down on the couch and let the remote rest in his lap. He had made it to this age without ever having to endure The Sex Talk, and it was terribly unfair that he should have to have it now. With Dean in the next room. With the whole apartment hot and airless and Dad looking the kind of serious he'd looked when Sam had had the chicken pox and almost ended up in the hospital.

And anyway, Dad had to know that having Dean for an older brother had taken care of every possible detail or factoid Sam could ever want to know, starting in the fourth grade when he'd looked up _fuck_ in the Oxford English Dictionary. Dean was the one who'd told him not to worry that he wouldn't go blind, who'd taught him how to shoplift Playboy magazine, who'd showed him that the premium channels on cable systems sometimes showed porn late at night, and even if the picture was scrambled, the soundtrack definitely wasn't. Dean was the one who'd been suspended during his junior year for downloading topless cheerleader shots at school, and had figured out after that how to do it without getting caught.

Dean was the one who'd been having sex at fifteen. Sam was pretty sure Dad didn't know about that.

"Can we talk about this some other time?" Sam demanded, strangling on his own spit. Without waiting for an answer, he flipped on the television. He watched sidelong as Dad straightened in his chair, and stood, and turned away.

"Fine," came that deep gruff voice.

Just then Dean darted into the room, in his good jeans and a clean shirt and with his wet hair combed. "Keys?" he asked Dad. His boots were untied, the tongues flapping forward over his toes. "Come on, Dad, you promised."

"I did," Dad said, vague, and pulled the keys out of his pocket. "What's her name?"

"Sally Livingstone. She's a nice girl." Sam didn't need to turn his head to know the grin plastered across Dean's face. Those boots made noises toward the door.

Dad raised his voice a little, as if he wasn't sure he'd be heard. "You be careful, son."

Dean didn't respond. The door banged shut behind him, and after a minute the car started up, growling and roaring like a wild animal.

Slow, as if he'd suddenly become old, Dad crossed the room and sat on the couch next to Sam. A heavy arm settled on the back of the couch, warm behind Sam's head. "You don't have to worry about Dean," Sam said, more to complain than to actually communicate.

"I know," said Dad, and lapsed into silence. They stared at the television together, and managed not to say a word.

***

Most supernatural creatures are not fans of the noonday sun, but Dad said daylight so it was daylight. So here Sam was, sweating in the thick air under the trees, desperately grateful for the shade. There was not a breath of wind, although he'd got up early and sat on the front stoop and watched wisps of mist rise off the marshy land at the bottom of the hill. It was that or lie in bed awake while Dean snored, splayed gymnastically across his bed, one sock on and one sock off, still smelling like Sally Livingstone's privates.

And now it was early afternoon, full hot early New York summer, buzz of far-off insects and the occasional scream of a cicada above his head. Sam paced to keep out of a roving cloud of gnats, trampling the underbrush in the tiny clearing. He had no weapon, just a couple yards of red ribbon to tie around the thing's neck, so that it would have to stay and Dad and Dean could come and kill it. They were only a shout away, maybe two hundred yards, Dean probably up a tree just because he thought it made him badass. Sam got to wander at the edges of knee-high ferns, stumbling over oak roots like elbows at a sleepover, waiting to betray a unicorn.

What he could see of the sky through the canopy was achy, bright; the oak and maple leaves sat still and flat like dogeared pages. Sam picked a likely spot, an exposed root below the widest tree in the clearing, and sat down to wait. Without human voices and noises, the forest was full of the foreign babble of birds. Sam followed the plan and startled whistling (even Dad would never get him to sing), just this and that, snatches of whatever got into his head.

He was stripping a fern into a many-fingered skeletal hand and fumbling his way through the Devil's Brigade March when twigs crackled somewhere nearby. Deer don't step on twigs; they don't make noise at all if they don't have to. Rabbits are too light to break a twig. Sam wondered for a second whether mountain lions still might wander the wilderness, even here, so close to the Poconos and the safety of civilization. He stopped whistling.

A whuff, some big creature's breath. Sam dropped the fern. The steam of its breath looked like mist, so it appeared at first to be a dream, an hallucination, fading in and out of reality. But then it stepped forward, close to where Sam sat, and it was unmistakable: Sam had found his unicorn.

It wasn't a horse with a horn on its forehead; but it wasn't a deer or a moose either. It was something huge, like an ox, but with delicate ankles and a fine pink quivering nose on the end of a long muzzle. Its chin was marked with a bit of white beard and ivory antlers, six or eight points each, grew from its white head. Its eyes were slate, intelligent, fringed with white lashes. It stepped forward, casual, and lowered its head to bite at the ferns.

"Holy shit," Sam breathed. He had to lick his lips to be able to whistle again. Instantly upon his making a note the creature raised its head, focussing on him. It blinked, once, twice, and approached him. There was no sound but Sam's breathy notes and the massive thump of cloven hooves on the soft dirt and underbrush. It paced up close, close enough so its breath moved the hair away from Sam's forehead. It was gorgeous.

Still whistling, Sam found himself reaching up to touch that creature, to feel the delicate skin of its mouth and to press his palm against the muscle in its neck. Sam felt the thick white fur between his fingers, the hot flesh under his hand, and marveled. The creature huffed once or twice, and while Sam watched amazed it lowered its body to the ground, tucking its hind legs behind it. As light as a brotherly jostle, the creature rested its chin on Sam's shoulder and closed its eyes.

There was a red ribbon in Sam's back pocket, but all he could do was trace the shape of its ears: weird careful shapes, like exotic calla lilies, but warm and quivering, alive, covered with sensitive hairs. "Hello," Sam mumbled. "Hello, you. My name's Sam."

The creature made a low noise in its throat, resounding, like the groan of an elderly tree trunk. Sam traced up to the edges of its horns, hesitated, and then felt the sharp tips, their hardness, the dry residue that came off onto his fingers: tiny brown flecks of dried blood. A shaky long breath, another, and Sam tried to collect himself and make sense of it. He was so overwhelmed he forgot all about the soldiers lying in wait.

They, of course, had not forgotten about him. While Sam caressed the white fur in front of him, a heavy noise came thumping down out of the trees some hundred yards away, crashing through the woods towards the clearing. "Jesus, Sam!" came Dean's call, echoing weirdly off the trees so it seemed to come from every direction. "Sam, look out!" Instantly the creature was on its feet, flanks twitching. Sam stood too, and hid his hands in his front pockets.

"I'm okay," Sam said, but Dean probably couldn't hear him. The creature looked him over, shook its head sideways, as if inviting him along, and began to trot away. Sam could not but obey -- his feet were moving before he realized what he was doing. The creature flicked its tail at him and took off in a great bound, one two three and gone, and Sam chased after into the dim woods. The sun penetrated poorly to the forest floor, and Sam stumbled over roots and low creepers, trying without success to keep an eye on that white hide as it gleamed in the piercing daylight. He heard but hardly registered Dean calling after him.

***

As the afternoon passed, Sam sweated and cursed and walked in circles. He had no idea where he was and the leaves were so thick he couldn't really even sight his direction off the sun. There was no trace of the magnificent white creature, only ferns and moss and myrtle. Sam remembered again the brambles Dad had encountered: they'd ripped at his arms, as if holding him back. Sam hadn't run into any brambles at all, not even a wild rose.

He was wondering vaguely about ticks, and what he should do about them, when he looked up and realized that he couldn't sight off the sun at all: it was gone. The tiny patch of sky he could see had turned from blue to gray, and was getting darker even as he watched.

The thick, stagnant summery air disappeared suddenly as the temperature plummeted. Wind plastered Sam's hair to his forehead, and then twirled it up above his head so it danced one way and then the other way. The bones in his face seemed to flex, the air pressure fell so quickly; he sneezed twice and then had to pop his ears six or eight times in the course of a minute. So, in addition to being lost, hungry, and pissed off, he was going to get rained on. Perfect.

Shivering in the chill breeze, Sam ducked into another clearing for a better view of whether lightning would be in the offing. The clouds weren't that ordinary sullen purple like rain, or even a good old thunderstorm; they were a sickly dark gray-green, like the look on Dean's face after he puked. That was -- bad. The clouds whipped and billowed, spreading themselves like ominous jelly across the sky, and while Sam stood there watching something hard doinked him on the head.

"Ow!" Sam shouted, and hunched his shoulders involuntarily. Another something banged him on the shoulder, and then a third on his upraised hand. Sam watched it bounce away, not a brown acorn as you might expect -- wrong season or no -- but something white. Some hard white ball of -- hail.

Hail. Winchesters were plains people, no matter how much time they spent tramping around in the woods; Sam knew hail as a harbinger for tornadoes, and thus cause for panic. He darted back under the oak branches, all the way close to the trunk of a gigantic old oak tree, while the hailstones slithered through leaves and thumped on living wood. As they collected on the open ground, Sam gauged their size: the first few that had hit him were small, pea-sized, but in only a minute they had grown and were now as big as superballs. Except they were solid balls of ice, formed somewhere up in the middle of the storm cell, and didn't have any give to them. People got killed in hailstorms sometimes, even without factoring in the twister winds.

Thunder rolled somewhere far, and then cracked up close, deafening. There was no safety next to the massive oaken roots; there was no safety in the open air. The hailstones were huge now: tennis balls, baseballs. They left fist-sized pockmarks in the dirt, uprooting ferns and sending dead leaves flying. Something brown flew over Sam's feet. A rabbit, frenzied, fled first one way and then the next, rear feet levering, ears flat against its head. A squirrel sat very still next to Sam's shoe. He looked up and saw birds in the branches above him, hundreds of birds. Swallows, sparrows, crows, starlings. A hawk perched not five feet above his head, wings flapping uneasily as it ignored the prey around it. The wooden clatter of the hailstones drowned everything else out anyway, but Sam could have sworn that not one bird was making a noise at that moment.

The story they tell you is that you hear a tornado the instant before it strikes, as if suddenly you were next to a freight train at high speed, or a truck roaring past. Sam wondered if he would hear a thing through this racket. And then suddenly he did, heard a thing, a distinct crunch somewhere near. The hail stopped at once, not a slackening but as if someone had paused the hailstones in midair. The open ground of the clearing was a mass of tumbled ice, five or six inches deep; and through that unseasonable snow strode the creature, calm and confident and directly towards where Sam was crouching for refuge.

As before, it was massive, shocking, and in the cold blank air its flanks steamed. Sam stared up at it, awed. A sparrow flitted from the oak tree to sit on the creature's antlers, and sang a careful note. It was Wild, not in a stupid, fleeing sense like the rabbit of a moment ago, and not like the foxes and coyotes Sam had seen in his years on the margins of the unknown. This was Wild, a rule unto itself, a thing that had power humans wouldn't understand. Its breath, humid and flinty, surrounded Sam in a cloud. It stared down at him out of depthless slate eyes.

"I won't let them try again," Sam said slowly. "They won't try to hunt you any more. I promise." He moved slowly, palms up, and dug into his back pocket for the red ribbon. He held it up and it unfolded itself away from his fingers, a silken cascade. The snort of the creature was the only wind that moved it. It was a silly thing to think that a scrap of red fabric could hold such a terrible and wily beast. Sam realized that the creature had never been in danger.

The pink muzzle lifted, nostrils trembling as it scented under the oak's canopy. Looking up, Sam could see how many branches were broken, how many of the green leaves were sifting slowly to the forest floor. The birds all looked down in silence, expectant. The creature tossed its head once, twice, antlers spearing the air, and as if as a signal every bird took flight at once.

Sam gasped, eyes moist, as the different avians flew apart, like an explosion of feathers, even the hawk stretching its neck to beat high and far and away. The sickly green clouds were turning to gray, ordinary thunder and rain. Light-headed, Sam almost fell over, catching himself at the last minute with a hand in the pungent dirt. The other hand stayed high, red ribbon fluttering, and with slow deliberation the creature bared its teeth and bit.

He could not control the cry that ripped out of him as he watched the blood well. Sam had gauged those long, flat teeth -- horse-teeth, ruminant-teeth -- as they approached his arm, expecting them to gather up the offered ribbon delicately. Like a wise beast out of myth, it would impart some kind of gentle lesson and leave, but no -- it was a bite, a painful one on the forearm, Sam's fingers galvanizing against the shock of it and the blood dripping fast down to his elbow. He clutched his wrist and cradled the throbbing mess to his chest, panting.

The creature was gone, too quickly for it to have just walked away. It had disappeared from one instant to the next, as if it had never been. The carpet of hailstones was untouched in the clearing. There were no birds in the trees or panicked rabbits at his feet. He was alone. He stumbled against the oak tree as he stood.

"Hey!" came a call from far off. It was somewhere to his right, and he came out to stand in the clearing as a light drizzle began. "Hey!" came the same voice. From another direction, Sam heard baying dogs, a dull yo-yo-yo as they chased some prey into the horizon.

"I'm here," Sam said, shaky, and then again louder and more forceful. "I'm here. It's me, it's Sam."

He wrapped his plaid shirt around his arm while he waited. The drizzle continued and thickened, soaking him through, and as the hailstones melted they rose up as mist, insinuating itself between the treetrunks, cottony and impenetrable. Sam realized that a night in this wilderness might mean his death from exposure, even in high summer. With the clouds as thick as they were, he didn't even know whether it was day or night.

"Christ," came Dad's voice suddenly, behind him. "Where in the hell did you run off to?"

Sam spun and tripped over his own feet in doing so, so although he'd meant to fall into Dad's arms anyway, he did so literally. He had forgotten his new-grown body, though, and he almost knocked Dad over.

"Easy, boy," Dad soothed him. He was like Sam, in soggy shirtsleeves and his hair a whirlwind across his forehead, but he radiated warmth, big shoulders steaming. "Whoa, you're bleeding."

"It was so --," Sam babbled, breathless, and then stopped himself. Dad dug out his radio to contact Dean, and had to shout over the static. They stood together in the clearing, rain bouncing enthusiastically off their skulls, Dad's arm keeping him warm and upright, and Sam looked over his shoulder to see a smear of his own blood on the bark of the pale oak's trunk.

***

The three of them listened dully to the weather report as they drove home, at dusk. It had blown all the way from South Dakota, a vast corridor of disorder, all in about twelve hours. An F3 tornado had touched down in Deposit, just the next county over, and a few more further north: Mechanicville, Stillwater. Someone had been killed; some people had ended up in the hospital. Sam sat in the back seat, arm bound to his chest, and tried not to blame himself for that.

It was a long quiet drive. There was a tree down on Stebbins Street, so they had to go the long way around to get home. Dean in the front seat kept reaching up to worry at a mark on his neck, again and again, till Sam leaned forward and saw in the wavering rainy dimness that he had been torn by brambles, on neck and ear and shoulder. He hadn't said anything about that. Sam peered at Dad, and noticed a few tiny brown beads of dried blood on his t-shirt.

Sam hadn't seen any brambles at all. He sat back, bewildered, and listened to the rain. The memory of the creature seemed to be fading in his memory, dissolving like a dream.

When they got home, Dad made Sam sit at the table and not do anything. Dean even went and fetched a towel and dried his head for him, as if he were a little kid. Sam glared at him, but Dean was smiling, and used the same towel on himself. He stripped out of his damp clothes as he headed for the bedroom. Dad had the medical kit in his hands, and put it down right next to Sam. There was an awful lot of stuff in there -- gauze, pills, weird long tweezers and scissors and some wicked scalpels he'd never been allowed to touch -- and Sam watched amazed as Dad pulled a chair up close and chose out thread and needle.

"Don't look, Sammy," he said, hunching forward as if he could just put his head in the way so Sam couldn't look. But Sam's torso was pretty long, and he could out-twist his blocky father with ease. He let his arm be handled this way and that as Dad unwound the flannel binding that secured the wound, and was surprised by the rubbing alcohol. He let out a hiss and Dad glanced up at him.

"I'm not a baby," Sam protested. "I'm not freaking out."

Dad made a noise in his throat. "You are too young to --"

"Dean," Sam interrupted, "How old were you when you fell off that porch and got stitches in your chin?"

Dean leaned out of the bedroom, more than half naked. "Eleven."

"See?" Sam told the room. "I saw those." Sam felt the needle in his flesh, a hot sting. Dad pulled the thread through, weird unpleasant tugs on the skin. Sam was suddenly a little woozy.

"What I remember you seeing," Dad said, low, while he turned the tiny curved needle in his gigantic fingers, "was the palm of my hand, since I covered your eyes so you _wouldn't_ see." He was methodical, working the delicate thread around in a loop and pulling it tight for the knot. Sam realized he was in for about twenty more of those before he'd be done.

"You'll get a lollipop when he's done," Dean added, walking into the room in dry jeans.

Dad turned over his wrist to capture the black thread. Sam swallowed. The stitches on his forearm looked like flies, sucking blood. He couldn't swat them. He caught himself swaying a little, and put his free hand down on the edge of his chair. Dad was breathing on Sam's hair, holding his old eyes far away so he could focus. Dean dragged the last chair at the table over by Sam's side, and sat down, leaning in for a look. His chest was firm against Sam's shoulder, something to lean on. Just for a second, just till he got his head together. Dad glanced at the both of them, and turned again to his work.

He turned Sam's forearm over to the tan side, and traced the moon-shaped injury. Warm, wide fingers probed at the raw flesh, manipulated the arm slowly. He pushed Sam's hand open and then closed again, as if Sam could not do that himself, and then gripped that hand gently in his own. "It's not so deep," Dad rumbled. "No nerves or anything. You never said what bit you," he added, as he readied the needle again.

The world swirled and danced in Sam's vision. "Nothing. A horse gone mad from the hail, running in the woods. Nothing." The creature of the forest was almost gone from his memory: only the smell of it lingered, and the sensation of touching its warm nose. He was suddenly sure he would never see it again.

"Okay, Sammy. I'm almost done." Warm breath on his head, that deep calming voice practically in his ear.

"You ever see hailstones that big?" Dean interjected, casual. "Wish we'd kept one. It'd survive in a freezer, right? Awesome show and tell, little brother." He sat still, just watching and letting Sam lean on him, and talked nonstop till the stitches were over.

Dad was winding gauze around Sam's forearm when the analytical brain kicked back in. "Hey Dean," he asked. As if breaking a spell, the sound of his voice prompted Dean to let him go and stand up and go look for leftovers in the fridge. "How come you broke cover? I heard you blundering around in the undergrowth and I --" he faltered, and didn't know how to speak about the experience he'd had.

"Saw some dogs," Dean said over his shoulder. "Whole pack of 'em, big red hounds. They were headed right for you, man. I thought they were wild, might attack you."

Dad closed the medical kit. "I saw 'em too. They were baying like bloodlust had sent them crazy. You didn't hear them?"

Mystified, Sam shook his head. "I didn't hear a thing."

"So you just ran off to scare the crap out of Dad?" Dean cracked, and shut the fridge. He of all people would know there was nothing in there but jelly. "Did you even see your yooneycorn?"

Sam sat still and thought very hard. Dad was watching him, eyes slitted. "No," he said at last. "I did see a deer with a big white patch on its back. Big one, huge horns, whipped right past my head, during the hailstorm. Did you see it?"

Dean shook his head. Dad said nothing.

"That's probably what Jimmy Preston saw," Sam concluded, glib. "Nothing supernatural about it."

"You think so?" Dad's voice was so quiet it might not even have carried to where Dean was standing. Sam watched him, the slow deliberate movements as he put away the medical kit and kicked off his squelching boots. He was huge in the space, cantankerous charisma or just breadth of shoulder Sam could never tell. In the kitchen, Dean leaned matter-of-fact at the counter, man-sized. Sam stood up too, wobbled a little so he had to put out a hand for balance, and then firmed. They didn't look nearly as tall when he was standing up too.

He surveyed the room. The windows were all shut pre-emptively against the rain, and the blinds pulled so nothing could see inside. "Great hunt's a bust," he said. "I think we can safely say that there is no such thing as unicorns."


End file.
